Apathy and Other Small Victories (6 page)

“I’m not sure what you mean here Bryce.”

“I bowl on Tuesdays. Come by then. At seven.”

I didn’t know he was a bowler. I didn’t know a lot of things. He was in the middle of either a complete nervous breakdown or a fucking bipolar episode, I knew that. But he didn’t seem grave enough to be suggesting murder, or depraved enough to be asking me to fuck his wife for $200 while he went bowling. He just seemed nervous and real sad.

“Will you? Please?”

The rims of his eyes had gone red. His neck was bleeding and there was that fucking white paint everywhere. His chin was starting to shake. I hate when people show emotion.

“Tuesday? At seven? Uh, sure.”

There was a good chance I was going to be murdered. Every scenario I’d imagined ended with me being dead.

If I was there to kill her, she’d suspect it and kill me first: self-defense.

Or I’d kill her, then Bryce would come home and kill me: life insurance.

Or I’d kill her, and Bryce would feel so guilty he’d tell the police everything and kill himself, then the courts would kill me: justice.

If I was just there to have sex with her, she wouldn’t know about it and think I was trying to rape her, so she’d kill me: feminism.

Or Bryce would come home, catch me fucking his wife, and even though he’d put me up to it, he’d kill me anyway: schizophrenia.

Or maybe he never meant for me to have sex with her, maybe he just wanted me to keep her company while he went bowling, play a board game with her or something, not fuck her. In which case he’d still kill me: miscommunication.

Whatever happened, there was a good chance I would die. So I made a rule: I wouldn’t try to rape or kill Bryce’s wife, and at the slightest hint of danger I would run away. This was a good rule, and still is, and if more people followed it the world would be a wonderful place.

I went to the door that Tuesday night with a plan. I would knock, and as soon as the door opened I would say, “Hello, my phone is broken.” Whatever happened, it would be said. I was fully prepared to have those be my last words. If Bryce’s bipolar pendulum had swung to homicide and he answered the door with a .12 gauge, if his keenly perceptive wife—unaware of my no-rape no-kill rule—was waiting with a can of mace and a meat cleaver, I would go down bravely, having said my piece. They would have been good last words. “Hello, my phone is broken.” That pretty much would have summed me up.

They lived in a basement apartment on the side of the building. They had their own entrance, a side door that led out to some steps and the sidewalk where the Dumpsters were. That was where they’d toss my body after all of it was done.

I knocked on the door, and just as I had decided to run away she opened it.

She didn’t have a meat cleaver, or a can of mace.

She was younger than Bryce and had dark blond hair, short and curly. She looked like someone I’d seen before, someone on a commercial, one for bathroom cleansers or soap. One of those women. She was wearing a navy blue bathrobe, maybe that was why.

“Hello, my phone is broken,” I said, suddenly realizing what an ass I was. This was my epitaph? Fuck.

Her face was an absolute blank. I watched her bottom lip but it didn’t move, and her blue eyes, a few shades lighter than her bathrobe, didn’t shift or waver. She had long eyelashes that beat in slow motion like the wings of a giant bird as I waited for her to pull a tommy gun from under her robe. Her face was a white sheet of paper with no words or punctuation. My paper face said, “Hello, my phone is broken” in very small type, and there was a fucking huge question mark in tiny parentheses taking up the rest of the page. The incongruity between the question mark and the parentheses was so great that it was comical, or it was very afraid.

Without changing her expression she turned, crossed the room, and went through another door.

After standing in the doorway for a while, I went in. My mind worked feverishly. She was in a bathrobe, but her hair was dry. Maybe I was just there to fix the shower. But I didn’t have any tools. Why didn’t I bring tools?

There was still a good chance I would die. I crossed the room trying to think of more last words, better ones, but I couldn’t think of any. They had shabby furniture but a nice TV. A big one. I wanted to see what was on, see if they had HBO. I went through the other door.

It was the bedroom. She was on the bed and her robe was on the floor. A ceiling fan was spinning overhead. The lights were already off and I shut the door behind me.

And then there was some sex. Technically, at least. Mechanically speaking, it was sex. Really we were just naked and smacking into each other. We were like two dead fish being slapped together by an off duty clown, swinging us by our tails, both of us slippery and cold, our eyes open and glassy, looking away. That’s about how passionate it was. Not that I’m much interested in passion. I always think of sex as somehow being orchestrated by an off duty clown, one who’s taken off the wig but not the makeup, and he’s in a T-shirt and sweat pants but he’s still got on the big fucking shoes for some reason. Whenever I have sex or remember it afterwards, even when I fantasize about it, he is there. But this was disinterested even by my standards. The only thing saving us from travesty was that we were too sloppy and uncoordinated to be formulaic.

And then it was done. We were both on our backs, and still the only words between us were “Hello, my phone is broken.” I wanted to ask her what was going on, why her husband had paid me $200 to have off duty clown sex with her, and if either of them planned on killing me for it. But she hadn’t said a word yet, and I wasn’t about to start talking.

This was a game, one I’d played hundreds of times before. Or eleven times actually, not counting her. It was like chess, but much more complicated because both of us were nude. Eventually she had to say something, had to spill everything, and then I would win. All I had to do was wait.

Then she broke.

“You should go,” she said.

A brilliant tactical maneuver.

I tried to mask my utter confusion and feign some dignity as I got dressed, but it didn’t work. It was dark though, and I don’t think she was even looking at me. I was doing it more for myself anyway.

I tried to keep my voice low and coarse when I said goodbye, like I was a lifelong smoker. And I did. I counted this as a victory. She didn’t say anything, so I just left. It was that night, out alone in a hotel bar, that I stole the first saltshaker. And then I stole three more.

It hadn’t happened in years. Not that I could remember anyway. And yet there I was, sitting before some asshole detective under that bright police spotlight, my face blowing up red because of an offhand comment that could have meant anything. And that was the problem.

“Are you blushing?” Sikes asked, smiling caustically. “You have a crush on me or something sweetheart?”

“Yes,” I said, and looked at him warmly.

He didn’t blink, and his smile only changed slightly. If he hated fags, or if he found me at all becoming, he did a good job of hiding it.

“I think I know why you were blushing,” he said.

“I’m not blushing, it’s just hot in here.”

“I think it’s a little chilly actually.”

“You’re not sitting under a spotlight.”

“You think that’s a spotlight? I’ll show you a spotlight!”

I did not know what to say.

He leaned back in his chair like he’d just bested me in a contest I did not know we were having.

“Now what did I say that made you get all flushed and rosy pink?” he said. “Do you remember?”

“I still think it’s the spotlight.”

“I think I mentioned something about married women. What do you have to say about that?”

“Not too much,” I said, holding my voice steady.

“Oh come on, you can tell me.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Well let me do it for you,” he said seriously, leaning forward in his chair. “I think you have a deaf girl fetish. And I think you had a perverted little crush on a married one who turned up dead. That’s what I think.”

He leaned back in his chair and looked at me. I felt immediately at ease. If there was anything to know, he didn’t know it either.

Doug was crying again. The bus door had smashed him up pretty good this time. He showed me the dents in his head. When he asked if I wanted to touch them, I said no. Even worse, as he lay on the ground—dizzy, sobbing, a shell of a man—and as the crowd gathered around him, someone said, “Hey! He got his head stuck in the door two weeks ago. It’s the same guy! It’s Bus Door Head!” and some people laughed.

Bus Door Head. It was mean, juvenile and stupid. It hardly even made sense. I was rolling. Luckily I was laid back in the chair with a latex dental dam jammed halfway down my throat so the laughing made it sound like I was choking instead. Doug shoved a suction hose underneath the latex and I was nearly asphyxiated.

“I just don’t understand why. Why does this keep happening to me?” he said. And Doug cried like the girl in the
After School Special
who hates high school and boys and life. He didn’t understand, but I did. It was obvious to me. This was how Doug’s life was, how it had always been I imagined, and how I knew it would always be. He just had that look. Game show hosts, mountain people, those Masai tribesmen who are on every other fucking cover of
National Geographic
, women who say, “Why would I ever get married, I’ve got cats!” and amputees. You know just by looking at them who they are. You could pick them out of a lineup. And if you had to pick Bus Door Head out of a lineup, you would always pick Doug.

He had strawberry blond hair. That’s enough right there. That’s all you need to know. If you’re a man with strawberry blond hair and you’re not in the circus or a Viking, odds are you have not found your place in life and never will. Doug’s strawberry blond hair hung down in limp curls that always looked like they were wet, like he was an out of work Hasidic Jew who just didn’t give a shit anymore. But then he also had the monk’s tonsure up top where male pattern baldness had started its slow, inexorably humiliating crawl. Doug’s head was an aesthetic and theological mess. And he had a mustache. It was too big and too ragged and trying too hard to compensate for what he’d already lost up top, and it was a few shades more strawberry than blond. He looked like the star of a new “Would you leave your child alone with this man?” pedophile awareness campaign, one that would be very effective.

Damn good dentist though. Damn good. And he let me pay my bills in installments, which hadn’t started yet.

“I know you’re good for it,” he said.

If it weren’t for his fainting spells I’m sure he would’ve had more patients. I never saw anybody else in there but me. Not everyone had my kind of time. The constant fits and iced tea breaks made every appointment a daylong affair. Except for the crying it was very European.

“I mean, Bus Door Head?” he said, tears draining into his mustache. “I’m sorry!” and he ran out of the room with his face in his hands, leaving me to take the fucking dental dam out of my mouth. Marlene came in and we were both laughing at Doug. After some sign language pantomime of the bus door squashing his head, we talked about her husband. His name was Brian and he was deaf too. I assumed that meant they had a lot in common and that they’d always have plenty to talk about.

So, we’re deaf huh?

Yeah, how about that.

Yeah.

They’d met at a deaf disco, which I thought was an oxymoron but it wasn’t. She told me it was a club where they pump the music up ear-bleeding loud and have sets of strobe lights and fog that smells like raspberries. Everyone turns up their hearing aids and dances to the whispers of music or the waves of bass, or they dance to the lights, or to the music they can’t hear because even with their hearing aids they’re still fucking deaf, so they dance to nothing whatsoever. I imagined it looked like the piano breakdown of a Charlie Brown special. And then when the raspberry fog rolls, everyone grinds on each other and starts making out. A really fucked up Charlie Brown special.

She’d met him there, in the raspberry fog, and they’d been married for almost two years. It wasn’t going so good. Both of you being deaf isn’t even enough anymore. That’s what the world has become. He was nice but lazy, and often jealous. With good reason, because she was cheating on him. She’d met the other guy a few weeks ago at a karaoke bar.

What were you doing at a karaoke bar?

I was singing, stupid.

Singing? You’re fucking deaf, remember?

So what! I can still sing!
she signed. And then she shouted “YOU KNOW I WISH THAT I HAD JESSIE’S GIRL!—DUH NUH NUH NUH NUH NUH NUH NUH—JESSIE’S GIRL!—DUH NUH NUH NUH NUH NUH NUH NUH—WHERE CAN I FIND A WOMAN LIKE THAT!”

“Jessie’s Girl,” by Rick Springfield. The “duh nuh nuh nuh” was the guitar part. She even sang the guitar part. The whole thing was loud and atonal and slurred together and off the beat, and she was clapping and dancing around as she sang. She was so happy. It was and remains the most tragic thing I have ever heard. The guy who watched the Hindenburg go down had nothing, nothing on Marlene’s version of “Jessie’s Girl.”

I have always thought of people as punch lines. I laugh at everyone, all the time. I laugh when they fall down, no matter how old they are, even if they break their hip and they’re my grandmother. Jesus my mom was fucking pissed. I laugh when they just miss their bus and then run after it waving their arms in a futile attempt to make the driver stop, and when he doesn’t it means they’ll be late for something very important. I especially laugh when they have nervous breakdowns. Sometimes I think about that footage of Jim Bakker being led away in handcuffs as he whimpers and goes fucking insane and I have to lie down to keep from fainting. The Other Sister and I Am Sam are two of the funniest movies ever made. I can’t even walk into a McDonald’s, not even to steal a saltshaker. All those people stuffing double cheeseburgers into their greedy mouths are just big fat sloppy sight gags to me. I was kicked out of my reading circle in third grade for laughing at a girl who couldn’t sound out her sentences. Years later she told me that I was singularly responsible for the stutter she’d later developed, and for her intense shyness and low self-esteem. The important thing was that I’d made a difference in her life. I have always found the misfortunes of others hilarious, because they’re not me. If there’s such a thing as karma I’m fucking doomed.